Mélusine

by Sarah Monette

Series:

Doctrine of Labyrinths #1

Publisher:

Ace

Copyright:

August 2005

Printing:

July 2006

ISBN:

0-441-01417-8

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

477

Felix Harrowgate is one of the elite of the city of
Mélusine. He's dashing, sophisticated, a powerful wizard, a
member of the circle of nobles who surrounds the Lord Protector, and the
lover of the Lord Protector's brother. He's also hiding a shameful past
and a history of manipulation and control by another court wizard who
practices dark magics poorly understood in Mélusine. As the
story starts, his past catches up with him and brutally uses him as a
weapon against the rulers of the city, leaving him crippled and insane.

Mildmay the Fox is a freelance cat burgler who makes an acceptable living
in the streets and on the rooves of Mélusine, knows the
territory and gangs, and has a past of his own as a kept-thief and
assassin. He doesn't have the ambitions of Felix; he just wants to
survive and keep away from the law. But slowly he's pulled out of his
well-understood, if not safe, world and into Felix's and the problems of
the wizards.

Mélusine is unusually told in the first person from
two alternating viewpoints, both Felix and Mildmay. At the start, it's a
story of two worlds, two aspects of the same city and contrasting styles
of confidence and competence. Mildmay is immediately likeable, sounding
like a born storyteller, using street grammar and slang without
compromising readability and telling his story with an open honesty even
when he's doing something stupid. He's part of the underside of the city,
a wanted criminal, but his view is cleaner and more comfortable than
Felix's from the start. Felix is weak and hurting, tangled in darkness
and corruption he has no control over, and his story quickly becomes
brutal and devastating. Everything he tries to do buries him deeper and
hurts him more. As the story develops and Felix sinks into madness, it
becomes a tale of two personalities trying to understand each other across
an impossible gap, and of the contrast between a wholly practical view of
the world and an entirely symbolic one.

Mildmay is my favorite part of this book, and for the first half or so I
cringed away from Felix's parts and eagerly awaited more of Mildmay's
story (even when it wasn't going anywhere quickly). He has an appealing
sense of honor and fair-play, and a compelling, self-aware way of arguing
with himself and telling his own story that makes one naturally root for
him. The book catches fire once Mildmay finally meets Felix (which takes
half the book) and becomes the one person who's truly on Felix's side and
truly trying to see through Felix's madness to find the reality at the
root of his reactions. If, like me, you've read a lot of epic fantasy,
always liked the streetwise thief or assassin who joins the hero's party,
and wished you could hear the story from their perspective rather than the
boring coming-of-age kid, you'll appreciate Mildmay.

Felix, on the other hand, is a harrowing portrayal of someone pushed until
his mind breaks. This is not a story where the hero is brought just to
the brink and is then rescued in the nick of time. Felix is used,
tortured, left as scapegoat, and used and abused again in a disturbingly
realistic portrayal of someone systematically deprived of allies. His
resulting magic-driven schizophrenia is realistic enough to border on
horror in places, and despite magic symbolism providing a bit of a handle
on it, is not smoothed over or toned down to be less disturbing. The
first part of the book shows the reader all too well that no one cares
about him, no one believes him, he has no way of effectively communicating
what he's perceiving, and none of this is likely to change. It makes the
final meeting with Mildmay far more powerful, but it's not pleasant
reading.

This human drama is set against a beautifully deep background. Monette
both constructs a world full of history, politics, philosophy, and schools
of magic and avoids breaking it down into neat categories and
classifications like a role-playing manual. This world is complex and
realistically messy, the characters have a limited grasp of schools of
thought outside of their own education, lines between magical schools are
fuzzy and confused, and magic feels poorly understood and fraught with
peril. The world feels rich in a way that I rarely see in fantasies, in
large part because it's not set up as a series of intellectual dominoes
the books will knock over. The characters aren't going to methodically
visit every point on the map (there is no map), we won't be systematically
introduced to each well-defined school, and the world feels like it has a
history that lives on around, before, and after the characters. This
sense of murky depth is rare and adds a lot to the book, particularly when
a thematic focus of the story is how one chooses to act when one is out of
one's depth.

Mélusine has one great leading character, another who
if not as good is a scarily well-written schizophrenic and therefore a
very different viewpoint, an excellent background, and thorny, difficult
problems of survival, understanding, and morality to wrestle with. So
far, so good. The place where it occasionally came up short for me
(beyond early scenes with Felix that are painfully hard to read) is
pacing. We can guess from the start that the interesting parts aren't
going to happen until Mildmay and Felix meet, but setting up the players
and getting the plot underway takes some 200 pages. It's not that nothing
happens in those 200 pages — many of the scenes are
individually quite enjoyable — but there's still the feeling
that this is all mere setup. And even after Felix and Mildmay finally
meet, there's another extended travel section, with assorted side
excursions, that I became weary of a bit before it was over. I liked the
characters (including the supporting cast, which is excellent and mostly
free of stereotypes) and where Monette was taking them, but sometimes they
take their sweet time getting there.

This is the first book of a series, which partly explains the quantity of
setup and should also serve as a warning that you won't get a complete
ending. Much that's set up here is not resolved, including the primary
plot motivation. The primary focus of Mélusine,
though, is Mildmay and Felix's burgeoning relationship, and that plot
reaches a satisfying and worthwhile conclusion that's wonderfully
unsentimental and true to the emotional difficulties of the characters. I
will definitely be reading the sequel.